The Plot by Jean Korelitz (digital book reader txt) 📗

old English teacher, and the mother of his high school girlfriend, who must have spent the reading wondering what her daughter had ever seen in Jake.) What had been even more exciting about those first-round Seattle readings, and the hundreds like them all over the country, was that people actually came to them, people who were not his parents or high school teachers or otherwise somehow obligated to attend. The forty who’d shown up for that Elliott Bay reading, for example, or the twenty-five at the Bellevue Barnes & Noble, were complete strangers, and that was just astonishing. So astonishing, in fact, that it had taken a couple of months for the thrill to wear off.

It had worn off now.

That tour—technically the hardcover tour—had never really ended. As the book took off, more and more dates were added, increasingly for series where purchase of the book was part of the price of admission, and then the festivals started getting appended to the schedule: Miami, Texas, AWP, Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime (these last two, like so much else about the thriller genre he’d inadvertently entered, had heretofore been unfamiliar to him). In all, he’d barely stopped traveling since the book was first published, accompanied by a worshipful off-the-book-page profile in The New York Times, the kind that had once made him weak-kneed with envy. Then, after a few months of that, the novel’s paperback had been rushed into print when Oprah named it her October selection, and now Jake was returning to some of his earlier stops, but in venues even he had never conceived of.

The S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, for example, had over 2,400 seats—Jake had looked that up in advance. Two thousand four hundred seats! And as far as he could tell from where he was sitting, every single one of them was occupied. Out there he could make out the bright kelly green of the new paperback’s cover on people’s laps and in their arms. Most of these people had brought their own copies, which he supposed did not bode well for the four thousand copies Elliot Bay was now unpacking at the signing tables out in the lobby, but man it was gratifying to him. When The Invention of Wonder was published nearly fifteen years earlier, he had settled on the I’ll-know-I’ve-made-it fantasy of seeing a stranger reading his book in public, and needless to say, this had never happened. Once, on the subway, he had seen a guy reading a book that looked tantalizingly like his, but when he edged closer, took a seat opposite, and checked it out, he’d discovered it was actually the new Scott Turow, and that had been only the first of several such crushing false alarms. Neither, obviously, had it happened with Reverberations, of which fewer than eight hundred copies had even been sold (and he’d purchased two hundred of them himself as cheap remaindered copies). Now this auditorium was full of living, breathing readers who had paid actual money for their tickets and were here in the enormous space, clutching his book as they leaned forward in their seats and laughing uproariously at everything he said, even the banal stuff about what his “process” was and how he still carried his laptop around in the same leather satchel he’d owned for years.

“Oh my god,” said the woman in the other chair, “I have to tell you, I was on a plane and I was reading the book, and I came to the part—I think you all probably know the part I’m speaking of—and I just, like, gasped! Like, I made a noise! And the flight attendant came over and she said, ‘Are you okay?’ and I said, ‘Oh my god, this book!’ And she asked me what book I was reading, so I showed her, and she started to laugh. She said this has been happening for months, people yelping and gasping in the middle of a flight. It’s like a syndrome. Like: Crib syndrome!”

“Oh, that’s so funny,” said Jake. “I always used to look at what people were reading on planes. It never used to be by me, I can tell you that!”

“But your first novel was a New & Noteworthy in The New York Times.”

“Yes, it was. That was a very great honor. Unfortunately it didn’t translate to people actually going into bookstores and buying it. In fact, I don’t think the book was even in bookstores. I remember my mother telling me they didn’t have it at her local chain store on Long Island. She had to special order it. That’s pretty rough on a Jewish mother whose kid isn’t even a doctor.”

Explosive laughter. The interviewer—her name was Candy and she was some sort of local public figure—doubled over. When she got control of herself, she asked Jake the thoroughly predictable one about how he’d first gotten the idea.

“I don’t think ideas, even great ideas, are all that hard to come by. When people ask me where I get my ideas, my answer is that there are a hundred novels in every day’s issue of The New York Times, and we recycle the paper or use it to line the birdcage. If you are trapped in your own experience you may find it hard to see beyond things that have actually happened to you, and unless you’ve had a life of National Geographic–worthy adventures you’re probably going to think you have nothing to write a novel about. But if you spend even a few minutes with other people’s stories and learn to ask yourself: What if this had happened to me? Or What if this happened to a person completely unlike me? Or In a world that’s different from the world I’m living in? Or What if it happened a little bit differently, under different circumstances? The possibilities are endless. The directions you can go, the characters you can meet along the way, the things you can learn, also endless. I’ve taught in MFA programs, and